Police Kill Unarmed Car Wreck Survivor Running to Them for Help

A 24-year-old former college football player wrecked his car so badly in Charlotte, North Carolina yesterday that he had to climb out a rear window to get out. He took off running for the first house he could find and began banging on the door for help.

The woman inside didn’t recognize the man, Jonathan Ferrell; terrified of the stranger, her immediate reaction was to slam the door in his face, hit her panic alarm and dial 9-1-1.

Ferrell continued to try and get her attention. When the police showed up, he took off running for them. He didn’t make it very far.

One officer reacted by pulling out a stun gun, but it malfunctioned, so another reacted by pulling out his gun. He opened fire.

The officer gunned down the unarmed car wreck survivor in the street, killing him. Ferrell’s totaled car was found nearby after the fact.

All three officers at the scene have been put on paid leave. Officer Randall Kerrick has been charged with voluntary manslaughter, a felony, and is being held on $50,000 bond.

While the woman who was home alone may have been justified to slam the door in the guy’s face and call the cops, the cops reportedly did not even give the guy a chance to get to them before Kerrick fired multiple shots that left Ferrell dead in the street. According to CNN, “Police used both ‘charge’ and ‘run’ in their description of what Ferrell did.” Yeah. Because apparently he had been in a bad car accident and needed help.

The police used to be the people you could run to for help. That no longer seems to be the case in America.

Our post-9/11 nation, complete with the continued militarization of police, breeds a society of fear. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is currently investigating just how far this trend has gone:

American neighborhoods are increasingly being policed by cops armed with the weapons and tactics of war. Federal funding in the billions of dollars has allowed state and local police departments to gain access to weapons and tactics created for overseas combat theaters – and yet very little is known about exactly how many police departments have military weapons and training, how militarized the police have become, and how extensively federal money is incentivizing this trend.

Some examples the ACLU cites include police killing a confused seven-year-old after they threw a blinding, deafening flashbang into his home; an Arizona SWAT team shooting an Iraq war veteran 60 times during a drug raid; a Colorado neighborhood getting shut down for four hours while SWAT teams hunted for a man suspected of shoplifting a bike from Walmart; North Dakota police borrowing a predator drone from the Department of Homeland Security to arrest a family that failed to return six cows that had wandered onto their property; and an Arkansas town announcing plans for SWAT to regularly patrol streets with AR-15 assault rifles…you know…just because.

These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors.The raids terrorize innocentswhen police mistakenly target the wrong residence.And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.

Stories like Ferrell’s are becoming so commonplace, it’s ridiculous. Earlier this year, a man with Down’s Syndrome was choked to death by an off-duty officer patrolling a movie theater because he wouldn’t leave after the movie ended. The suspected officer was not charged with any crime. Police in California arrested a man for filming them and then killed his dog. A small organic farm in Texas was hit with a ten-hour-long paramilitary raid last month that appears to have been for nothing more than code enforcement. Alcoholic Beverage Control agents recently swarmed a University of Virginia student in a convenience store parking lot and drew their guns, and one even jumped on the hood of her car all because they thought the sparkling water she bought was beer.

It just gets more and more ridiculous as the examples of police state mania go on and on.

As the ACLU says, “Towns don’t need tanks.”

So many police in this country have apparently lost sight of their basic mission to protect and serve the people. Even though there are still good cops out there, sadly it is getting to the point that when in trouble, a cop is the last person anyone would want to call.